Entry-Level Forward Surgical Team Training Is Associated with Increased Confidence of Primary Combat Surgeons

Background: In recent years, we have established an entry-level Forward Surgical Team (FST) training program in a Chinese military medical university for the 5th grade undergraduates, who would be deployed to different military medical services as primary combat surgeons. This study aimed to assess the role of this pre-service training in improving their confidence with combat medical skills, after several years since they received the training. Methods: We conducted a nationwide survey of 239 primary combat surgeons who have ever participated in an entry-level FST training program before deployment between June 2016 and June 2020, which was for evaluating on a 5-point Likert scale the benefits of entry-level FST training and conventional surgery training in improving their confidence with combat medical skills. The difference in scores was compared using the student t-test. Significance was considered as P Results: The total score was significantly higher for entry-level FST training than that for conventional surgery training (30.76 ± 4.33 vs. 28.95 ± 4.80, P There was no significant difference between the training for surgical skills confidence scores (18.03 ± 8.04 vs. 17.51 ± 8.30, P = 0.098), but for non-technical skills, the score of entry-level FST training was significantly higher than that of conventional surgery training (12.73 ± 5.39 vs. 11.44 ± 5.62, P The distributions of confidence scores were different under various subgroups by demographics. There were no significant differences in scores between the two training in all specific surgical skill sets except “life-saving surgery” (P = 0.011). Scores of all 4 non-technical skill sets were significantly higher for entry-level FST than those for conventional surgery training (P Conclusions: The training should be considered as an essential strategy to improve confidence in combat medical skills, especially life-saving surgery and non-technical skills, for primary combat surgeons.

An Optimized Framework for Surgical Team Selection

In the healthcare system,a surgical team is a unit of experienced personnel who provide medical care to surgical patients during surgery.Selecting a surgical team is challenging for a multispecialty hospital as the performance of its members affects the efficiency and reliability of the hospital’s patient care.The effectiveness of a surgical team depends not only on its individual members but also on the coordination among them.In this paper,we addressed the challenges of surgical team selection faced by a multispecialty hospital and proposed a decision-making framework for selecting the optimal list of surgical teams for a given patient.The proposed framework focused on improving the existing surgical history management system by arranging surgery-bound patients into optimal subgroups based on similar characteristics and selecting an optimal list of surgical teams for a new surgical patient based on the patient’s subgroups.For this end,two population-based meta-heuristic algorithms for clustering of mixed datasets and multi-objective optimization were proposed.The proposed algorithms were tested using different datasets and benchmark functions.Furthermore,the proposed framework was validated through a case study of a real postoperative surgical dataset obtained from the orthopedic surgery department of a multispecialty hospital in India.The results revealed that the proposed framework was efficient in arranging patients in optimal groups as well as selecting optimal surgical teams for a given patient.

Implementation of Resilience Engineering for Operating Room. Unveiling the Hidden Interactions among Multi-Professionals in a Surgical Team

Background: The implementation of resilience engineering for an operating room is difficult;however, its study would become important for the surgeon’s personal and surgical team in order to develop a new surgical safety management. An expert operator must perform an operation with his surgical team that includes an anesthetist, scrub nurse, and young assistant. However, there exist some gaps among these multi-professionals. Objective: From the viewpoint of an expert operator, to have an operation go well, we would describe how to reconcile their gaps. We will explain the gaps among the multi-professionals in a surgical team, such as hidden interactions between the operator and anesthetist, surgeon and scrub nurse, and expert operator and young assistant. Material and Methods: We assumed three types of interactions among the multi-professionals in the operating theater and we clarified how to bridge the gaps by revealing what the operator thinks, what the anesthetist thinks, what the scrub nurse thinks, and what the young assistant thinks in the surgical team, and by understanding how they perform during surgery. Outcomes: What the expert operator thinks and how he performs in surgery is summarized by the following three items: 1) safety is first, 2) achieving the operative purpose, and 3) fast surgery. We interviewed the surgical team members. In order for the surgery to go well, what the important thing is “safety first” for any surgical professionals. The sentence, “safety is first” is the magic words, such as “open sesame”. They can communicate with each other on the spot and build the team and system. To develop a strong and resilient surgical team, these four behaviors are important to improve the performance as a system: 1) sharing the same goal and same priority, 2) understanding gaps with clear verbal communication. Coming out from own professional boundaries (takotsubo), speaking in words, 3) all of us, having a strong will (iron heart), and learning anger management, and 4) improvising even in difficult situations. Conclusion: We would like to summarize the items learned from my three described scenes, which are 1) to develop a strong and resilient surgical team, 2) what we have to do, and how we have to perform, and 3) how we can develop a team and system.